Democracy Now! Audio - Democracy Now! 2025-10-10 Friday

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

Democracy Now! Friday, October 10, 2025

From New York, this is Democracy Now. I know that my home was level, but where is it? Where is it? I cannot find it. What is this? What do we do with our lives? Where should we live? Where should we stay? A house of multiple floors, but nothing was left?

As a ceasefire begins in Gaza, tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians are streaming north to return to their homes finding nothing but rubble. As Israeli troops start pulling back, we'll get the latest on the ceasefire hostage deal with Palestinian attorney De Anabutu, an analyst Amjad Ura. then to the Nobel Peace Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 to Maria Corina Machado. The Nobel Committee recognizes a leading U.S.-backed Venezuelan opposition leader.

The announcement coming as Venezuela's founding mounting threats from the Trump administration, which has repeatedly bombed boats off the car. host of Venezuela. We'll talk to the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Greg Grandin. Then the acclaimed writer Cory Docterot, author of a new book, and bleepification, why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it. In poopification is a theory that describes platform decay, how these platforms lock people in and then abuse them and become worse and worse, but we can't seem to leave them until they're just a giant pallet crap. And we've all of all experienced this decay of platforms that we relied on in so many ways.

All that and more coming up. Welcome to Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. The Israeli governments approve the first phase of a Gaza ceasefire deal. It includes an exchange of the hostages held by Hamas and return for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. Al Jazeera is reporting, Israeli forces in Gaza have started to retreat behind the lines agreed to under the deal. Tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians are streaming from the southern part of the Gaza Strip to the north. On Thursday, Hamas's exile Gaza chief Khalil Al-Qaeda said all Palestinian women and children will be released and issued a statement

declaring an end to the war. Today we announce that we have reached an agreement to end the war and aggression against our people and to begin implementing a permanent ceasefire. The withdrawal of the occupation forces, the entry of aid, the opening of the Rafa crossing in both directions and the exchange of prisoners. It comes as President Trump announced the Israeli hostages will be released from Gaza on Monday or Tuesday. Under terms of the deal, 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences and another 1,700 gazins detained by Israel during the war will be released. Meanwhile,

the U.S. is sending about 200 troops to Israel to monitor the ceasefire deal. This is Palestinian civil defense member Nul al-Shoghmi, who joined celebration Thursday in Gaza City. Honestly, these are indescribable feelings. We can't believe it. But thank God, the war has ended and we are alive. Honestly, we hope the war does not come back and for this to be really the end. In Tel Aviv, Israelis gathered at the public plaza

known as Hostages Square to celebrate news of the ceasefire. This is Udi Goren, cousin of an Israeli hostage, Tal Jaime, who is confirmed dead in Gaza and whose body is believed to be held by Hamas. Bringing back the hostages is just the first phase of this deal. And rightfully so, finally prioritizing bringing them home before anything else. But after we bring them all home, it's time to start rebuilding our future.

Meanwhile, Israeli Army Radio is reporting 600 aid trucks will be allowed to enter Gaza Daily, coordinated by the United Nations and other international aid groups. Tom Fletcher's, the UN's top emergency relief coordinator. So here is what we plan to deliver in the first 60 days of the ceasefire. We will aim to increase the pipeline of supplies to hundreds of trucks every day. Food, we will scale up the provision of food across Gaza to reach 2.1 million people who need food aid and around 500,000 people who need nutrition. Famine must be reverted in areas where we're going to be.

where it has taken hold and prevented in others. We'll have more on the Gaza ceasefire agreement later on the broadcast. A grand jury has criminally indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James after President Trump instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi to go after his political enemies, writing on X quote, we can't delay any longer. It's killing our reputation and credibility, Trump said. Lindsey Halligan, who President Trump installed to serve as U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, presented the case to the grand jury. Last month, Halligan secured charges against James Comey, the former FBI director.

Trump forced out his previous U.S. attorney for refusing to bring charges against both Comey and James. This is Attorney General Letitia James. This is nothing more than a continuation of the president's desperate weaponization of our justice system. He is forcing federal law enforcement agencies to do his bidding. And so today I'm not fearful. I'm fearless. The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Konita Machado. The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced its decision to ceremony in Oslo earlier today. She's receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve

a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy. In 2023, Machado launched a campaign to challenge incumbent President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela's 2024 election. She was barred from running after the government accused her of corruption and cited her support for U.S. sanction. against Venezuela. Machado has vowed to privatize Venezuela's state oil industry. She's praised right-wing Latin American leaders, including Argentina's Javier Millet. In 2020, her opposition party, Vente, Venezuela, signed a pact formalizing strategic ties with Israel's Lakud Party, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Machado has said that, if elected, she'll move Venezuela's

embassy in Israel to Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Well, of more on Maria Coriore. Machado, later in the broadcast with the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Greg Grandin. The Nobel Peace Prize being awarded a time when the U.S. bombed four boats off the coast of Venezuela killing 21 people. Colombia's president, Gustavo Petra, said Wednesday the U.S. killed Colombians in one of the boats that bombed in the Caribbean for allegedly carrying drugs. In Peru, lawmakers swore in a new president, 38-year-old head of Peru's legislature, Jose Iieri, soon after voting unanimously to remove Presidentina Baluarte. Her removal comes after months of deadly protests in Rural Andean and indigenous communities' rights groups

accused Baluarte's government of using lethal force to suppress the protest. She was also enmeshed in a corruption scandal involving undeclared assets and watches. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the U.S. has begun implementing parts of a bailout for Argentina by finalizing a $20 billion dollar currency swap with Argentina's central bank. Argentina's far-right President Javier Milley is an ally of President Trump. On Thursday, eight Democratic senators introduced a bill that would prevent the Treasury Department from rescuing Argentina's economy. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren said, quote,

it's inexplicable that President Trump's propping up a foreign government while he shuts down our own, unquote. In Washington, D.C., the United States. federal government shutdown has entered its 10th day. On Thursday, President Trump said at a cabinet meeting, he'll permanently cut programs approved by Congress during the shutdown, like billions of dollars in climate and infrastructure for democratic-led states, adding, quote, we're only going to cut Democrat programs, unquote. The White House has suggested furloughed federal workers may not receive back pay. On Thursday, House Speaker Mike Johnson ruled out advancing a stand-alone bill to pay the salaries and benefits of military members who are due to

miss paychecks on October 15th. Meanwhile, Food and Water Watch reports, if the shutdown continues into next week, 5.3 million children under the age of five will lose access to SNAP food assistance and benefits with many likely to go hungry. That's on top of more than 2 million people set to lose some or all of their SNAP benefits under the budget reconciliation. bill Trump signed in July. A federal judge in Chicago's issued a temporary restraining order against President Trump's deployment of hundreds of National Guard troops to Illinois after Chicago and state officials sued to block the move. U.S. District Judge April Perry said an oral ruling Thursday, deploying soldiers would, quote, only add fuel to the fire that

defendants themselves have started, unquote. The ruling came as Illinois's Democratic governor, J.B. Pritzker, once again accused Trump of overstepping constitutional limits on his authority. At every turn that they've tried to militarize our cities. Indeed, look at what ICE and CBP are doing. They're wearing fatigues. They're carrying long guns, automatic weapons. They're coming to downtown, come on, downtown Chicago, Michigan Avenue. What is the purpose of that? It's all a show. Separately, another federal judge in Chicago ruled Thursday, federal agents violated the constitutional rights of peaceful demonstrators, journalists, and religious leaders at recent protests against ongoing ice raids. A lawsuit brought by victims of the ICE violence accuses federal agents of a pattern of extreme brutality, saying they tackled and slammed people to the ground, and fired rubber bullets and pepper balls at peaceful. protesters and working journalists. In her ruling, district court, Judge Sarah Ellis wrote, quote, individuals are allowed to protest. They're allowed to speak. That's guaranteed by the

First Amendment of our Constitution, and it's a bedrock right that upholds our democracy, she said. Judge Ellis's temporary restraining order also requires all uniform federal agents to prominently display identification like badge numbers on their uniforms or helmets. Meanwhile, while in Tennessee, National Guard troops are scheduled to begin patrolling the streets of Memphis today over the objections of city officials. They'll add to a surge of federal law enforcement officers already in Memphis. Trump claims the deployments aimed at quelling violent crime in the majority black city. On Thursday, Trump signaled he's prepared to send troops into even more cities. And we're restoring law and order in our country. We're restoring it here, but we're restoring it

right now we're in Memphis. We're going to Chicago. We're going to other cities. Oklahoma's Republican Governor Kevin Stitt has criticized the deployment of National Guard troops to Illinois. Stitt is the current chair of the National Governors Association. Speaking to the New York Times, he said, quote, Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker and Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration, unquote. Stitt stated that President Trump should have first. federalized troops already in Illinois.

A Texas court has halted the execution of Robert Robertson, whose 2003 murder conviction over the death of his two-year-old daughter was based on the shaken baby syndrome theory, which has never been scientifically validated. On Thursday, a narrow five-to-four majority of Texas's Court of Criminal Appeals granted Roberson's request to stay his execution, citing a Texas law that allows for new trials in cases with flawed scientific evidence. The trial court that convicted Roberson will now consider whether he should be granted a new trial. Throughout his more than 20 years on death row, Roberson has always maintained his innocence. And those are some of the headlines. This is DemocracyNow. DemocracyNow.org, the war and peace report. I'm Amy Goodman.

Israel's government has approved the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal that includes a pause in Israeli attacks and the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons. President Trump announced yesterday the Israeli hostages will be released from Gaza on Monday or Tuesday as he plans to travel to the Middle East. According to the deal, 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences and another 1,700 people from Gaza detained in the last two years would be released. Hamas has demanded the release of prominent Palestinian political prisoner Marwambaghouti, but his name was reportedly secretly removed from the prisoner exchange list by Israel.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is sending about 200 troops to Israel to monitor the ceasefire deal. The Israeli military Friday confirmed the ceasefire had come into effect as soldiers retreated from parts of Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians, including families that have been forced to the south, began their trek back to northern Gaza after news that Israeli forces were withdrawing. Returning Gaza City residents made their way through mounds of rubble and destroyed neighborhoods, searching for any sign of their homes and belongings. Among them, Hidahraz. when they said there was a withdrawal to find my home. I'm walking in the street, but I do not

know where to go due to the extent of a destruction. I swear I don't know where the crossroads is or where my home is. I know that my home was leveled, but where is it? Where is it? I cannot find it. What is this? What do we do with our lives? Where should we live? Where should we stay? A house of multiple floors, but nothing was left? Al Jazeera reports Israel's army said it would allow of 600 humanitarian aid trucks carrying food, medical supplies, fuel, and other necessities daily into Gaza through coordination with the United Nations and other international groups. On Thursday, the exiled Hamas Gaza chief, Khalil Al-Haya, declared an end to the war. Today we announce that we have reached an agreement to end the war and aggression against our people

and to begin implementing a permanent ceasefire. The withdrawal of the occupation forces, the entry of aid, the opening of the raffa crossing in both directions, and the exchange of prisoners. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke today in Israel. Today we mark one of the greatest achievements in the War of Revival, the return of all of our hostages, the living and the dead as one. This way we grapple Hamas. We grapple it all around, ahead of the next stages of the plan, in which Hamas has decided. armed and Gaza is demilitarized. If this can be achieved the easy way, very well. If not, it will be achieved the hard way. In the United States, President Trump hailed his administration's

ceasefire plan during a cabinet meeting Thursday as concerns mount regarding potential U.S. and foreign intervention in the rebuilding of Gaza. Gaza is going to be slowly redone of tremendous wealth in that part of the world by certain countries. And just a small part of that, what they make will do wonders for Gaza. For more, we're joined by two guests. In Haifa, Dianabutu, Palestinian human rights attorney, former advisor to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organization. She's just recently in a piece for the Guardian. It's headlined, a magic pill made Israeli violence invisible. We need to stop swallowing it. And I'm Jeddharaki is a senior Israel-Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group, joining us from London.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now. Deanna Boutu, let's begin with you. First, your response to this ceasefire hostage deal that's just been approved by the Israeli government and Hamas. Well, first, Amy, it's really quite repulsive that Palestinians have had to negotiate an end to their genocide. It should have been that the world put sanctions on Israel to stop the genocide rather than forcing Palestinians to negotiate an end to it. At the same time, we're also negotiating an end to the famine, a famine that Israel, again, created. Who are we negotiating with the very people who created? that famine. And so it's really repugnant that this is the position that Palestinians have been forced to be in. And so while people here are elated, happy that the bombs have stopped,

we're also at the same time worried because we've seen that the international community time and again has abandoned us. Everybody is happy that the Israelis are going home. But nobody's talking about the more than 11,000 Palestinians who are currently languishing in Israeli prisons being starved, being tortured, being raped. Many of them are hostages picked up after October of 2023, being held without charge, without trial, and nobody at all is talking about them. So while people are happy that the bombs have stopped, we know that Israel's control has not at all stopped. And it's made it, Israel's made it clear that it's going to continue to control every morsel of food that comes into Gaza. It's going to control every single construction item that

comes into Gaza. And it's going to continue to maintain a military occupation over Gaza. This is not a peace agreement. This is not an end to the occupation. And I think it's so important for us that we keep our eyes on Gaza and start demanding that Israel be held to account, not only for the genocide, but for all of these decades of occupation that led to this in the first place. Can you talk about the exchange of hostages, Israeli hostages, dead and alive, and Palestinian prisoners? According to the Hamas Gaza chief, I believe they're saying all women and children, Palestinian women and children picked up over these last two years, or is it beyond, are going to be released. and then, of course, there are the well over 1,000 prisoners who are going to be released. No, not quite.

So there are 250 who are political prisoners who are going to be released. And that list just came out about a little over an hour ago. But there are also 1,700 Palestinians solely from Gaza who are going to be released. And these were people, these are doctors, these are nurses, these are journalists, and so on, who Israel picked up after the 7th of October 2023 and has been holding as hostages. These are the people that are going to be released. There are still thousands more, Amy,

that are from the West Bank that we do not know what is going to happen to them. And so while the focus is just on the people in Gaza, and again, there is no path for freeing all of those thousands of Palestinians who are languishing in Israeli prisons, being starved, being tortured, being raped. What's going to happen to them? Who's going to be focusing on them?

I don't think that it's going to be this U.S. administration. I want to talk about the West Bank in a minute. More than a thousand Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank just over the last two years. But I first want to get Amjad Iraqi's response to this deal that has now been signed off on. I mean, watching the images of tens of thousands, this sea of few. humanity of Palestinians going south to north to see what they can find of their homes and places like Gaza City, not to mention who's trapped in the rubble. We say something well over 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, but we don't know the real number. It could be hundreds of

thousands. Indeed, Amy. And to kind of continue off of Deanna's points, this is a deal that really should have been made long, long ago. We've known that the parameters of this truce have been on the table for well over a year, if not since the very beginning of the war, what used to define is an all-for-all deal, the idea that Hamas would release all hostages in exchange for a permanent ceasefire.

And the reasons for the constant foiling of it are quite evident. And it's important to recognize this, not for the sake of just lamenting the lives, the many lives that have been lost and the massive destruction that could have been averted, but it needs to really inform the next steps going forward. The biggest take,

way of what's happening right now is that in order for a ceasefire to be sustained, in order for Gaza to be saved from further military assault, you need massive political pressure. And we've seen this really build up in the past weeks and months. You saw this, for example, from European governments, which even through the symbolic recognition of Palestine's statehood, was very much venting their frustration with Israeli conduct in the war, the fact that the EU was actually starting to contemplate more sort of punitive measures against Israel, such as partial trade suspensions, potential sanctions against Israel. We saw this building up over the past few weeks.

Arab states have started to use much of their leverage, especially after Israel's strike on Doha, or on Hamas's offices in Doha. We started seeing Gulf and other Arab and Muslim states come forward to President Trump at the UN, saying that Israeli aggression cannot continue like this. And most crucially is, of course, President Trump himself and of Washington finally saying that needs to put its foot down to stop this war, which we've heard repeatedly from Trump himself, but this is really the first time since the January ceasefire agreement

where Trump has really insisted that this come to an end. Now, there's much to be sort of debated about the Trump plan itself, but this aspect of the truth cannot continue and certainly cannot save Palestinian lives unless that pressure is maintained. The concern now is that that pressure will recede or alleviate because there's now a deal that's signed. But actually, in order to enforce it, that pressure really needs to be maintained. What do you think was the turning point, Amjad?

The bombing of Qatar? Now, I mean, the New York Times had an expassee that Trump knew before, not just in the midst of the bombing, that Israel was bombing their ally to try to kill the Hamas leadership. But do you think that was the turning point? It certainly might have expedited. I think a lot of factors that were already building up. said, pressure had been mounting against Israel for quite a while. There was really outrage not just at the continuance of the military assaults, but the policy of starvation, which was very

evident on the ground, and Israel's complete refusal to let an aid, its failed project through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. So this had all been building, but I do think the strike on Doha really pushed Arab states to say that enough is enough, to see them really meet altogether with President Trump and create a bit more of a united position to insist that really couldn't go on, I think, has really signaled that Israel really crossed a certain line geopolitically. Now, of course, that line should have been recognized as being crossed well before because of the facts on the ground in Gaza. But I do think that this has helped to kind of push things over the edge a bit more assertively. There are also speculations about Trump, of course,

trying to have his name in for the Nobel Peace Prize and potentially other factors. But I do think that the timing of this, again, regardless of what ended up pushing it over the line, it is unfortunate that it has really taken this long. And it's really up to global powers and foreign governments to recognize that in order to make sure that this stays, that they really need to keep that pressure up. And Amjaduraki, the core demand of the ceasefire is that Hamas disarm and end its rule. What security guarantees is Hamas seeking for its own members to lay down their arms and not face a wave of arrests or assassinations?

how is this going to work and talk about who you see running Gaza? So these things are still a bit unclear. So throughout the ceasefire talks, Hamas has kept insisting about the idea of U.S. guarantees that Israel will not in the war. But there's never really any clear, concrete way to prove this. And as we've seen before, like in the January ceasefire deal, and in much of the ceasefire talks, even if President Trump expresses his desire to see an end to the war, oftentimes he would still hand steering wheel to Prime Minister Netanyahu. And if Netanyahu decided that he wanted to thwart the ceasefire talks, if he wanted to relaunch

military assaults and the Israeli military and the government would back it, then Trump and Washington would fall into line and amplify those calls. And even President Trump himself would sort of cheer on the military assaults. And so this factor has certainly weighed a lot on Hamas, but I do think there's a combination of pressure, the fact that Arab states have insisted on Hamas to. try to show at least signal certain flexibility, even though many of its demands have been quite consistent throughout the war. But the fact that I think Hamas is now feeling that there's also a bit more pressure on Israel to actually ensure that they at least try to take the gamble,

that they will not return to war. And in regards to decommissioning and disarmament, publicly Hamas has placed a red line around this right to bear arms. But historically, and even recently, they do say that they are willing to have conversations about decommissioning, as long as it's tied to a political framework, especially one that's tied to the establishment of a Palestinian state. Now, one can really debate how much this process is actually quite feasible, and obviously the Israeli government and much of the Israeli public is quite adamant in its opposition against Palestinian statehood. But Hamas may at least offer some space for those conversations to be had. There are discussions about it, potentially giving up what it might describe as its larger

or more offensive weaponry, like rockets or anti-tank missiles. And there's bigger questions around firearms, but I think it's important to put this question not as a black and white issue, as something that has to come first in the political process, as Israel is demanding, but one that requires trust-building and confidence-building in the rubric of a process of Palestinian self-determination. This is important, not just in the case of Palestine, but across many conflicts around the world where the question of decommissioning about establishing one rule, one gun, one government for a society, requires that kind of process. So it shouldn't just be a policy of destroying and military assaults and so on.

You do need to engage in these questions in good faith. There are so many questions, DeAnabutu, and this first stage of the ceasefire hostage deal is really the only one that Netanyahu addressed today in his speech. You're usually in Ramallah. You spend a lot of time on the West Bank. Where does this leave the Palestinian Authority? I don't think the West Bank has talked about in this deal. And what about the fact that we're looking at pictures of Netanyahu surrounded by Steve Whitkoff on one side and Jared Kushner, who has talked about, as we know, famously referred to Gaza as very valuable waterfront property?

Well, I think that this plan was really an Israeli plan, and it was repackaged and branded. as a Trump plan. And you can see just in the text of it in the way that all of the guarantees were given to the Israelis and none given to the Palestinians. It's really an Israeli plan. But beyond that, it's important to keep in mind that when Trump was going around and talking about this plan, that he consulted with everybody but Palestinians. He didn't talk to Mahmoud Abbas. He didn't even let Mahmoud Abbas go to the UN to deliver his speech before. the UN. I'm pretty certain he didn't speak to the UN representative, the Palestine's representative to the UN. And so this is once again, we've got a plan in which people are talking about

Palestinians, but never talking to Palestinians. So again, this is very much an Israeli plan repackaged as a Trump plan and branded as a Trump plan. In terms of them looking at Gaza as being prime real estate. This is not at all different from the way that they've done it in the past. And this is not at all the way that Israel has looked at Palestine. And this is because this is the way that colonizers look at land that isn't theirs. They ignore the history of the place. Gaza has an old history. It has some of the oldest churches. I think the second oldest church in the world. It has some of the oldest mosques. It has an old civilization. We want, want Gaza to be Gaza. We don't want it to be Dubai or any other place. We want it to be Gaza.

And so the idea of somehow turning it into prime real estate, this is the mentality of somebody who's coming from outside. This is the way that colonizers think. This isn't the way that the indigenous think. And so you can see in this plan that it's not only the idea of the outside coming in, but they certainly didn't consult Palestinians at all. As for what's going to happen to the Palestinian Authority, It's clear that they don't want the Palestinian authority in the Gaza Strip. And it's clear that they do want to have a foreign authority in the Gaza Strip. But once again, Amy, when is it that Palestinians get to decide our own future? Are we really going back to the era of colonialism when other people get to decide our future?

And that's what this plan is really all about. Well, we're going to be continuing to cover the story. President Trump is expected to be there for the signing of. the ceasefire in Sharma al-Sheikh in Egypt on Sunday, and the hostages and prisoners are expected to be released on Monday or Tuesday. Deanna Butu, I want to thank you for being with us, Palestinian Human Rights Attorney, former advisor to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and Amjad Iraqi, Israel-Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group.

When we come back, the Nobel Committee recognizes a leading U.S. back, Venezuelan U. position leader. The announcement coming as Venezuela is facing mounting threats from the Trump administration, which has repeatedly bombed boats off the coast of Venezuela. We'll speak with the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Greg Grant, and stay with us. I'm a hurrah, or not you're in front of ush, I'm a-sraar, not die-wish, I'm the sound of myrish-choochooch, I'm in the wussed the footha with us,

I'm ha'amom-y, The tune in the menace clare. The Tunisian American artist Emel, Emel Methluthi, Emel Mothlouithi, performing Kaumti Hottah, my word is free. at the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize concert in Oslo. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org. I'm Amy Goodman. The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced today the recipient of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.

The Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 goes to a brave and committed champion of peace. to a woman who keeps the flame of democracy burning amidst a growing darkness. The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 to Maria Corina Machado. She is receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for her title. work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy. Maria Corina Machado meets all the three criteria stated in Alfred Nobel's will for the selection of a peace price. She has brought her country's opposition together. She has never

wavered in resisting the militarization of Venezuelan society. She has been steadfast in her support for a peaceful transition to democracy. Maria Corina Machado is a long-time U.S.A. nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize last year by a number of Florida Republicans, including then-Senator Marco Rubio, who's now President Trump's Secretary of State. In 2002, Machado supported the coup that briefly overthrew Venezuela's democratically elected president Hugo Chavez. Machado attempted to run for president against incumbent Nicolas Maduro in the 2024 race, but was barred from running after the government accused her of corruption and cited her support for U.S. sanctions against Venezuela. Edmundo Gonzalez ran in her place. Venezuela's national electoral council declared Maduro the winner, but the opposition

claimed Gonzalez won. Machado has vowed to privatize Venezuela's state. oil industry. She's also praised right-wing Latin American leaders, including Argentina's Javier Milay. The Nobel Committee's selection of Machado comes at a time of heightened tension between the U.S. and Venezuela as the U.S. continually bombs boats off the coast of Venezuela while threatening to launch a larger military operation. On Thursday, the Venezuelan government requested an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council to discuss the U.S. military actions. For more, we go to Greg Grandin, Yale University History Professor Pulitzer Prize-winning author, whose latest book is America America, a new history of the new world.

Professor Grandin, welcome back to Democracy Now, your response to this Nobel Prize announcement. Thanks for having me, Amy. It's a perplexing choice on a number of levels, and it seems inevitably. will bring about the opposite of peace. Machalo is not a unifier, as the committee said. She represents the most intransigent face of the opposition, and not just, as you mentioned in your introduction, not just against Maduro, but against democratically elected Hugo Chavez.

She was a supporter of the 2002 coup. She has constantly divided the opposite. opposition and handicapped the opposition, frankly, when the opposition was trying to come up with a more moderate position that could challenge the social, the socialism of 21st century socialism that Chavez represented, she constantly represented a more hard line in terms of economics, in terms of U.S. relations. And that intransigence has led her to rely on outside powers, notably the United States. So, I mean, they didn't give it to Donald Trump, but they seem to have given it to the next best thing in terms of, at least as well as Marco Rubio is concerned, if he needs justification to escalate military operations against Venezuela, it really seems to be a disaster.

choice and a smear on the, I mean, your next guest is Cori Docterow. It's really the insidification of the Nobel Peace Prize. I mean, they gave it to Kissinger in the 1970s, but at least they waited until he negotiated an end to the Vietnam War. I mean, I think of Rigoberta Manchu who won it in the early 1980s and her whole family was wiped out by U.S. supported militarists and debt squads in Guatemala. And now they've given it to somebody who, is completely aligned with the most militarist and darkest face of U.S. imperialism. It's really a shocking choice. And very quickly, again, this coming as the U.S. bombs one Venezuelan boat after another,

the Colombian president, Petro said, and one of the bombings, a Colombian was killed. But an interesting piece in the New York Times, President Trump calling off efforts to reach a diplomatic agreement with Venezuela, paving the way for potential military escalation. Richard Grinnell, the special presidential envoy interim executive director of the Kennedy Center, had been leading the negotiations with Maduro. He has been instructed to cut off all diplomatic outreach. So as we wrap up, if you can talk about what is happening right now, and the rage President Trump, interestingly, will feel at not getting the Nobel Peace Prize

himself, as he is very explicitly demanded, and escalating what's going on in Venezuela. Yeah, it's just going to harden positions all around. And Machalo has not denounced. She's actually endorsed the general framework that legitimates the bombing of these go-fast boats in the Caribbean, four of them now, last one filled apparently with Colombians. She hasn't denounced, and she's supported. and she supports the idea, the framework that the government is basically a cartel

and to blow up these boats is not to kill Venezuelans, but to kill, as she puts it, narco daficantes. I mean, it's really, you know, there are plenty of feminist activists that oppose Maduro in Venezuela that would have legitimated the peace prize, that would have legitimated the opposition. There's Isabelle Mejiaz, who's a feminist. She's the head of Aranya Feminista, the feminist spider. There's Anna Rosa Torres, who considers herself a socialist, that she opposes the opposition and the U.S. policy. That would have made sense if the committee felt that, you know, it was time for Maduro to go.

But this really just actually strengthens Maduro because it, you know, it confirms his narrative about the opposition being in leading. with the Trump administration. So you could just imagine that this is going to, as I said, bring about the opposite of peace. It's going to, it's slaying the groundwork and justifying greater military escalation. It's really a disaster. It's really, you know, really a hard to understand how they came to this decision. Greg Brandon, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Yale University History Professor Pulitzer Prize-winning author, his latest book, America, Medica, a new history of the new world. Next up, we speak with the acclaimed writer, Corey Docterow, author of a new book, and

what should we say, and bleepification, why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it. Stay with us. Yesterday I saw you standing there. With your hand against the pain Looking out the window At the rain And I wanted to tell you

All your tears were not in vain But I guess we both knew we'd never be the same. Never be the same. Peaceable Kingdom by Patty Smith performing at our Democracy Now, 20th anniversary next year we celebrate our 30th.

This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org. I'm Amy Goodman. We end today's show with the acclaimed writer and tech activist, Corey, Dr. Three years ago, he coined a term to describe how online platforms like Facebook degrade over time as platform owners seek to maximize profit. The phrase Dr. O came up with went viral, but due to FCC rules, we can't say it on the air. We'll just call it an bleepification.

The bleep is covering a word that rhymes with hit. It's also the title of Corey Doctor's new book. Corey, welcome to Democracy Now, the book title and bleepification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It? Why don't you start from the beginning? What do you mean by this term? So it's a way to talk about how the platforms go bad, but it's also a way to talk about why the platforms go bad.

So we can see this characteristic pattern of decaying platforms, where first they're good to their end users. they find a way to lock those users in. And once it's hard for the users to leave, they can make things worse for those end users to tempt in business customers. Those business customers also get locked to the platform. And so then things are made bad for them too

because they can't readily depart. And eventually you end up with a platform where all the value has been harvested by shareholders and executives. And there's just kind of a mingy homeopathic residue of value left behind for the platform users. And yet, because of these broader factors that are about the social critique,

the political and economic critique, it's hard for us to leave these platforms. And they sort of shamble on. So tell us how it works. Take one example, whether you're talking about Google, whether you're talking about Twitter, whether you're talking about Facebook, and talk about how they started and where they're headed. I think Facebook's the canonical case, right? So Mark Zuckerberg, 2006, wants to open up beyond American College Kids. You don't need a dot-EDU address anymore.

So he says, come to Facebook. We're the platform that, unlike MySpace, will never spy. on you. And we're only going to show you the things that you ask to see. So if you subscribe to some people, that's what's going to be in your feed. And so people pile in, and they lock themselves into something called the collective action problem, which is just a way of saying, you know, you love your friends, but they're a pain in the butt. And even though you all want to hang out and play a board game this weekend, you can't agree on what board game to play, much less, even though you all agree that you hate Facebook, you can't agree on when it's

time to leave or where to go or how to reestablish yourself. So you get stuck there. And once you're stuck there, Mark Zuckerberg starts to make things worse for you to make things better for business customers. So they go to the advertisers and they say, you remember we told these rubes, we weren't going to spy on them. Total lie. We spy on them with every hour that God sends. Give us small dollars. We will target ads to those people with just incredible fidelity and we'll spend as much money as it takes to stop ad fraud. So you give us a dollar to show an ad to a user. That user's going to see that ad. And publishers get a similar deal. You know, we told these users we wouldn't stick stuff in their feed. They didn't ask to see. But we'll make an

exception for you. Put stuff on Facebook from your website. Little excerpts, link back to your own website. We'll just cram it into the eyeballs of people who never ask to see it. Some of them will click the link. You'll get to monetize that traffic. And so they become locked into. They become dependent on those users who are dependent on each other. And now ad prices go up. Ad targeting fidelity goes down. Ad fraud explodes. Procter and Gamble used to spend $200 million a year on surveillance ads. In 2017, they took that to zero and saw a $0 drop in sales because all those ads were just disappearing down the fraud hole. Meanwhile, publishers are finding they have to put more and more of their content onto

Facebook in order to just be shown to their own subscribers. So they have to substitute for their own website. And even, you know, you put a link in the bottom of your page. They're not even going to show that to anyone because maybe the link's a malicious link. So now you have all the value harvested for Facebook. And they're in this very brittle equilibrium because the difference between I hate this place, but I can't stop coming to it. and I hate this place. I'm not coming back. It's very brittle. You take one scandal, one live stream mass

shooting, people bolt for the exits, and then Facebook panics. And being tech bros, they call it pivoting. And so one day, you know, Mark Zuckerberg arises from a sarcophagus. And he says, you know, harkened to me, brothers and sisters, for I've had a vision. I know I told you that the future would consist of arguing with your racist uncle, using this primitive text interface I made in my dorm room to non-consensually rate the bangability of my fellow undergraduates. But actually, I'm going to transform you and everyone you love into a legless, sexless, low polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character so I can imprison you in a virtual world I stole from a 25-year-old satirical cyberpunk novel that I call the Metaverse, right? And that is the final stage of in bleepification.

The platform is a giant pile of bleep. So let's go to what you wrote about President Trump and the platform owners. In the United States, you write, at the 2025 inauguration, Trump spoke from within a decorative semi-circle of tech billionaires. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sender Pinchai, Apple CEO Tim Cook, TikTok CEO, Shouji, and of course, Elon Musk. These men intervened in many ways on Trump's behalf. So if you can talk about President Trump, his circle of platform owners, you've talked about Donald Trump's election. representing the ultimate triumph of imbleepification of the political realm. So, you know, this is a theory about not just why the platforms are bad now,

but you have to interrogate why they were better before. What stopped them from going back? Because we didn't invent greed in, like, 2017. So what was it that stopped them from going bad? My theory is they had constraints. That to worry about competitors, but then we let them buy all their competitors. They had to worry about regulators. But when you boil a company down to or an industry down to like five,

giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four, they have so much profits from not competing, and they find it so easy to agree that they capture regulators. They also had to worry about their workers, because tech workers have been so powerful. Even though they weren't unionized, they were an enormous demand, super productive. There's a National Bureau of Economic Research paper that estimates that the average Silicon Valley worker was contributing a million dollars a year to the bottom line of their employer, so their employers really valued them. They couldn't afford to lose them. They couldn't replace them. And you take all that away, and you get an environment in which people can do bad things with impunity.

They don't face any consequences. And Trump, that was his promise. I'll neuter the National Labor Relations Board. I'll get rid of antitrust unless you make me angry, in which case I'll do antitrust until you use the Trump coin tip jar on the resolute desk to give me some money. And I'm going to let you buy as many of your competitors as you want and not have to worry about any of these external sources of discipline. And, you know, even the best of us without discipline go horribly wrong, you know, this is the problem of people who can just shout at other people.

We all have writers we love who eventually get so big they can tell their editors to go to hell and then their books get really terrible. But, you know, Howard Hughes, if you gave him some constraints, would make you some pretty cool airplanes, take away the constraints. That guy starts wearing Kleenex boxes on his feet and saving his urine in jars, right? So what these platforms aspire to is their own demise, right? it's what Trump aspires to to be in a world in which no one can tell him no, and in which every bad idea that kind of materializes in the vacant spaces in his head becomes a policy. And so, you know, and shittification, and poopification is the collapse of discipline. And America's ruling class has managed to neutralize all the discipline that it ever faced.

Their weirdest worst ideas are the ones that we're all stuck with. What do you think of the Trump deal that would put his billionaire ally, Larry Ellison, who became the richest man in the world for a few minutes, a few weeks ago, in charge of TikTok? I think it shows you that the origin of this phenomenon is not users making bad consumption decisions. It's not executives being greedy. It's a policy environment that's like in bleepogenic, right? That when you have an environment that says you can do bad things and you can get away with it, then it doesn't really matter who's running the companies, right? Like we can say, oh, you know, Larry Ellison might be worse than the guy no one's ever heard of who runs TikTok.

But is he really going to be worse than it? I mean, TikTok thumb the scales for right-wing candidates in the last election cycle. And they were able to do that because they operate in total opacity. We have laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This is a Bill Clinton law from 1998. Section 12, one of that law makes it a felony, like you go to jail for five years and pay a $500,000 fine, for reverse engineering stuff to modify it. So if you wanted to put a different algorithm in your TikTok client or just stop it from stealing your data while you use it, that's a crime, right?

And so, you know, we could have said rather than we are going to replace one guy who fills a, you know, tech supervillain shaped hole with another guy who fills a tech villain shaped hole in TikTok C-suite, we could have said we're going to empower people, co-ops, nonprofits, even big commercial rivals to reverse engineer the TikTok app. to change how the algorithm works for you so that you see the things that you want to see, so that it becomes a platform that's responsive to you. And just as when we made it legal to block ads on the web, it's not legal on apps because you have to reverse engineer them. We instill discipline in companies who have to worry that if you made the ads too obnoxious on their website, you'd go install an ad blocker. 51% of web users have installed an ad blocker.

It's the biggest consumer boycott in human history. And so they have to think twice before they make it worse. when you take away that discipline, when you say, okay, well, you can do whatever you want and no one is, it can defend themselves, you have the full panoply of all the things you can do with digital tools where you can change the rules from moment to moment. You can change the recommendation system. You can, at your whim, alter the game. I call it the Darth Vader MBA. I'm altering the deal. Pray you don't alter it further. Then, and we're defenseless in front of it, you get the worst of all technological worlds, a world where technology torments you endlessly and never saves you from that torment. about Google, how it started and where it is now and what it's taking from. I mean, it's not only hurting consumers, it's not only hurting people trying to communicate, but businesses as well. Yeah, sure. So, you know, Google is a company that has had one really good idea. It was in the last millennium. They made a really good search engine. Virtually everything they made in house since has crashed and burned. Almost everything they make is a company they bought from someone else in

violation of antitrust law in waivers that were mergers, rather, that were waived through under both Republicans and Democrats. And they pretend they're, you know, Willy Wonka's idea factory. They're just like rich uncle penny bags buying other kids' toys, right? And they eventually became not just too big to fail. They became too big to care. In 2019, as we found out in the DOJ's lawsuit against Google last year, they, having acquired 90% search market share, stalled out on growth. Obviously. How are you going to grow your search when you've got a 90% market share? We're already all using it and we're already using it for everything. I mean, yes, they could breed a billion humans to maturity and make them Google customers. They called that product Google Classroom, but it takes a minute to mature. And meanwhile, they want growth now because investors want growth now. So in the memos that the DOJ published, we see this epic battle play out for the soul of Google. You have these two characters. One's this guy, Prabagar Ragavan. This ex-McKinsey guy came from Yahoo. He's a charge of search revenue. And he has this idea. What if we make the search worse? What if we turn off all the stuff that tries to guess the best match for your query? So that when you search,

you don't get the best match, you have to search again and maybe again and maybe again each time we get to show you more ads, right? That's growth. Now, he's opposed by this guy called Ben Gomes, who's kind of the epitome of an OG Googler. He is the guy who built out their server infrastructure. He started with one server under a desk at Stanford, built the global network of data centers, and now he's in charge of search technology. And in the memos, you can see Gomez is palpably horrified by this idea to make this thing that he's worked so hard for worse, just for this venal purpose. And then they have this fight, and the fight plays out in the memos.

And basically, Prabagar Raghavan and his allies' argument is, I don't really care if this makes you feel icky, because it's going to make us more money, and we will face no consequences. Now, it's not just that Google was shorn of the consequences of making their product worse. they also used to have to really value their workers. But because the workers thought of themselves as temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs and thought, well, we're being treated really well now, why do we need a union? As soon as supply cut up with demand and you got half a million tech layoffs in the last three years,

the workers lost the power to discipline them too. So in this last minute that we're going to do a part two, is there a breaking point beyond which even locked in users rebel against these tech platforms? Where do you see the fight back? So there is a breaking point. I don't think we want to reach it, right? There's a breaking point where people who live in the urban wildlife interface are like, oh, my house keeps burning down every year. I guess I'm going to leave now that everything I own has been destroyed. Ideally, you'd want those people to leave beforehand. So people are on these platforms because the platforms do good things for them. People are on Facebook because it's where the people with the same rare diseases them meet. Or it's where the people in the country, they emigrated away from meat. Or it's where their affinity group meets. And we don't want those things to be destroyed by a forced departure. We want to evacuate. the platforms. And I think that in the European Union, there's this effort underway to create like portability. So if you leave Facebook or Twitter, you might be able to go to another platform. Maybe that's Blue Sky. Maybe it's Mastodon. Maybe it's something that hasn't been invented yet

and still stay in touch with the people you left behind. So you don't have to choose between the people you love and the platform you hate. So we're going to talk about Blue Sky, Mastodon, and much more in part two. But right now we have to wrap up the show. Corey, Dr. Rose, a science fiction author, activist, journalist. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. His new book is, okay, well, we'll say, embleepification, why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it. That does it for our show. I'll be on the road. On October 17th, I'll be in Santa Fe at the Santa Fe at the Santa Fe at the Santa Fe Film Festival, where the new film, Steal the Story, Please, is going to be playing, and I'll be doing the Q&A after. On October 18th, I'll be in Woodstock, 19th, Zogarty.

I'm Amy Goodman. Check our website, DemocracyNow.org.